Records reconstruction

Records reconstruction covers transaction history rebuilt directly from bank, card and processor statements, a chart of accounts reconstructed to match how the business actually operates, and missing invoices and bills sourced where possible, with clear notes where they cannot be found. You get a reconstructed profit and loss and balance sheet for each affected period, plus a documented list of assumptions and gaps a preparer or lender can review line by line. Nothing is presented as a verified fact when it is really an estimate; the two are labeled differently throughout.

This fits a business whose books were never usable in the first place, not one that simply fell behind on an otherwise sound file. Typical situations: a departing bookkeeper who left no handover notes, a QuickBooks or Xero file where months were entered but never reconciled to anything external, a founder who ran the business out of a personal account for a stretch, or an acquired entity whose target-company records turned out to be thinner than represented. If your books are basically sound and just behind, multi-year catch-up is usually the faster and less expensive path; reconstruction is for the case where the books themselves cannot be trusted.

We start by inventorying what actually survives: bank and card statements, processor reports, prior tax filings, and any partial software file. Where a prior return is missing, we pull an IRS transcript rather than guess at a number that was already filed. From there we build a chart of accounts around the business as it runs today and map every statement transaction into it, period by period, cross-checking against prior filings where they exist so the reconstructed totals do not silently drift from what was already reported.

The recurring issues in a reconstruction engagement: years of transactions coded to one undifferentiated expense account, a QuickBooks or Xero subscription that was paid for but never actually reconciled, invoices and bills that exist nowhere except a vendor's own records, personal and business spending mixed in a single account with no memo trail, and a departed bookkeeper whose login and files are no longer accessible. Each of these gets addressed by rebuilding from the external statement rather than trying to salvage the internal entry.

Every reconstruction produces gaps that cannot be closed with certainty: a missing invoice, a cash transaction with no receipt, a vendor who will not respond to a records request. Rather than filling those gaps silently, we log each one as an explicit assumption, with the basis for the estimate and what would change it. That log is the actual deliverable a lender or a credentialed preparer relies on, since it lets them decide how much weight to put on any specific figure rather than treating the whole reconstruction as equally certain.

A foreign-owned single-member US LLC with thin transaction records carries a specific risk that a domestically-owned business does not: Form 5472 recordkeeping and filing requirements are strict, and the penalty for failing to timely file or maintain records starts at $25,000 per related party and keeps climbing every 30 days past a 90-day IRS notice period, with no cap. Reconstruction work for one of these entities prioritizes closing that gap before the next filing deadline, not after.

Records reconstruction is priced by how much source material survives and how many periods are affected, not as a flat fee, since a one-year gap with clean bank statements and a three-year gap with no surviving software file are very different amounts of work. Reference the published rate card on the pricing page for the ongoing monthly tier your volume will land in once the reconstruction is complete; the reconstruction fee itself is confirmed in writing after we review what statements and documents you actually have.